Chapter Twenty-Eight Nina
We left Morland by tunnel, of course, the mouth of which was hidden in a brick culvert in the city outskirts. We slithered to it single file, Patrick leading, the night always on the verge of dawn.
Tamir was desolate, cradling a heavy trunk to his chest. He slipped into the culvert last, shivering. “I ought to return to the dockyards, Meester Colson. Perhaps find passage to my homeland.”
“You’ll be looked after in Kenton Hill,” Patrick assured him. “They’re expectin’ you. You’ll be welcomed.”
“Will it be safe there?” I asked Patrick. Kenton Hill was no longer shrouded in anonymity, after all.
“By now, Gunner and Donny will have ensured Margarite was caved in. The hills are still wired and protected. Kenton is as safe as it can be, even if it’s no longer a secret.” Patrick opened a drain cover, revealing a ladder.
“We’ll point you down the right path, Tamir. It will take you to Dorser. A man named Otto will meet you there and escort you into Kenton,” John told him.
At the mention of Otto, Polly blanched.
“Send him the scribble, Polly,” Patrick said now, lowering himself onto the ladder. “Be sure to change the handwriting.”
Polly’s jaw twitched, but she stayed silent and obeyed without protest.
The tunnel was, as Patrick had promised, a stinking, waterlogged mess. The roof sagged threateningly, roots bursting between struts. The mud came up to our knees; a chorus of water leaks fell.
I was struck by a memory of me and Theodore in a Gilmore field, Professor Dumley watching as we slipped through the mire and tried to charm the soil into something fertile. I remembered falling, sinking into the bog, Theo laughing and taking my hand over and over, his cheeks smeared with the grime.
He offered me a wary smile. “If only Dumley could see us now.”
I didn’t yield even a twitch of my lips.
We worked in tandem, as we’d done in that field, him pushing the water back into the walls and me compacting the earth, stabilizing the ceiling, the timber frames groaning in relief.
We moved quickly at the spearhead, the presence of those behind us nearly forgotten.
Escaping into one’s medium was all-consuming.
I wrapped my expanding mind in the weight and texture of the earth, and it was a relief.
I did not batter Theo with questions about his attempts at redemption.
I didn’t think of Polly, who had betrayed us, betrayed Kenton, or even of Patrick, who, after everything, carried my heart around in his hands.
I didn’t think about his fingers on my thigh, his voice in my head.
I thought of nothing but earth.
Hours passed before we parted with Tamir at an indiscriminate fork, and I wondered how Patrick knew the way to go, how many times he’d traveled under the Trench.
The tunnel opened and dried underfoot, and Patrick led the way to Hoaklin, holding a lantern.
John whistled a miner’s tune happily from behind them in place of a canary.
I got the sense he was at home here, where ribbons of dark distended and took shapeless forms. He spoke ahead to Patrick as though he were stretching his tongue, sinking into a language he’d longed for.
“Thirty fathoms or more here, Patty.”
“Thereabouts.”
“You need intersectin’ struts every three feet, son. These are every four.”
“They’re bearin’ just fine.”
“Get Welsh down here. Tell him to reinforce every other cross section.”
“Welsh is dead,” Patrick said tiredly. “Got buried on the south line.”
“Bullerman, then.”
“He’s in the Coal Works now,” Patrick said. “And I’ll be gettin’ no one down here anytime soon. There’s more to do at home.” There was finality in it, a trace of ire.
John clicked his tongue loudly, mockingly. “Well, now. Got it all figured, have you?”
“I do.”
John chuckled. It weaved darkly into their midst, a monster rising. “Careful, son,” he said. “Don’t overstep.” And for the first time, I heard in his voice the ghost of Patrick’s—smoky, smooth, unsettling.
I shivered.
Ahead, Patrick showed no outward reaction, though I thought I saw the expanse of his shoulders go taut, tasted a tang of violence in the air.
Or perhaps the aggression was my own. Perhaps only I felt the sting of the barb.
“Overstep?” It had escaped some cage in my chest. I’d stopped on the path, turned to buck at John.
“Patrick has run Kenton Hill for the past two years.” And he’d hated it.
Hated every second of it. “You were nowhere to be seen.”
The entire party stuttered on the path.
I could hear John’s tongue rolling about in his mouth, hear it flick out and slide over his lip as though readying it. “And in that time, he found himself a bunch of swanks and let ’em run the whole fuckin’ thing into the ground.”
He was amorphous in the dark, a grunting, spitting outline, dissolving into men whose faces were indistinct, men from Scurry, my own father. He might have been any one of them.
I bypassed Polly and collided with Theo’s arm, barring me from passing. “Nina, don’t—”
“And what were you doing?” I asked, my voice tripling down the fathoms. “Two years a prisoner, and there’s not a mark on you to show for it! You look like you’ve eaten three square meals a day. Less can be said for your Union members in the brink.”
“The other Union prisoners were hanged,” added Theo, now frowning in thought. “It is a wonder that you were kept alive.”
“Information,” said Polly, breaking her self-imposed silence. “The House only trades in information.”
There was the sound of a pistol hammer drawing back, the flash of steel in the lamplight, the hollow middle of a barrel pointing between us in no particular direction.
“You know,” mused John, “there’s a lot I’ve endured in the last two years, caged like a dog in that fuckin’ swank city.
” His tone turned gravelly, as though he were spitting the words through gaps in his teeth.
He came into the nimbus of the lamp. “One by one, the other prisoners swung from the gallows, but a smarter man knows how to give ’em a proper runaround.
How to get inside their heads. And I won—I managed to keep myself alive.
So now, I won’t be lettin’ a trio of fuckin’ swanks imply that I’ve been on holiday. ”
The pistol oscillated between us, but John’s gaze was for me.
The moment hovered dangerously, stretching to its limit, the recoil sure to be punishing.
Instead, the sound of Patrick’s voice filled the tunnel. It was calm. Calculating.
“There’s not a single bullet in the barrel, Dad,” he said. “Put it away.”
The gun wavered, John’s face turned terrible, then abruptly expressionless. “Just makin’ sure they were listenin’.”
“Darin’ of you,” Patrick said, “to threaten an earth Charmer all the way down here.” It might have been lighthearted, except for the glare Patrick leveled at his father.
“It’s a matter of family honor, Patty,” John replied, pulling bullets from his pocket and rolling them around on his palm.
“It’s Colson law to put holes in bastards that test our loyalties,” John’s eyes flashed with menace at us.
“That way, we ain’t got to worry about people comin’ between us.
” John’s eyes flicked upward to where Patrick watched him as closely as one could here in the crust of the earth.
“Remember that man who picked Donny’s pockets, Patty?
How you took off his finger with a paring knife? ”
“I do,” Patrick said slowly. “He was takin’ advantage of a blind boy.”
“He was.”
“Just imagine what I’d do to the man who took advantage of me.” His voice was full of dark promise, and perhaps he meant it for Theo, or even Polly.
But he was looking at John.
“Tell me again, Dad,” Patrick said. “Who was it that gave my medium to the House?”
John gave no response. The two stood lock-eyed, a gun and three traitors between them.
And I volleyed my gaze between the two.
A distinct crack of timber suddenly echoed down the tunnel. The sound ricocheted back to them and they all ducked on instinct, as though bullets were flying. We froze.
Silence for a moment. Then a subsonic groan. A dawning awareness on Patrick’s face as he stared down the tunnel, and then he shouted, “Run!”
He picked Theo up by the scruff of his neck and shoved him back. Another crack rang out, the sound of falling earth, the yawn of a monster at their backs.
“Get up!” John shouted at Polly, lobbing her forward. “Go!”
The lantern light swung over Patrick’s eyes. In them, I saw pulsating fear.
I scrambled to my feet and bolted back the way we’d come.
We threw ourselves back down the tunnel, the snap of timber chasing us, each strut giving way as the earth above us bore down, sought to devour us, jaws closing.
I poured my mind to it, felt the idium thrum beneath my skin, already lethargic.
I couldn’t slow my feet enough to concentrate, couldn’t hold it all up after expending myself earlier.
The ceiling above us held only long enough for us to pass beneath it, my mind releasing it again soon after and letting it buckle.
Patrick kept one hand in the middle of my back, and I kept one hand to the ceiling.
I felt the earth hounding us. Eventually it would catch our heels and we’d be sucked under.
A fork ahead. John moving for it like a snake moves through grass. He disappeared sideways, pulling Polly after him, then Theo.
Patrick hooked his arm around my waist, and with a tremendous push, hurled me around the bend.
I toppled on top of Theo, my knees hitting metal.
And we were plummeted into deepest black.